Paczkator is a small Windows utility I wrote for the company I’m currently working with. Its purpose is to simplify the process of sending multiple big images (usually scanned documents) by mail. It’s small, pretty fast and requires no configuration from the user.

Features:

• Small, free and easy to install and use
• Automatically finds any images in the folder specified and scales them down if they are too big
• Zips the folder, opens your email application (Outlook Express by default) and creates an attachment for you.
• Warns you if the compressed folder is too big to send by email
• It’s localised. Currently it speaks English and Polish
• No administrator privileges required to install and run
• No additional software required to work properly

Download Paczkator 0.8 now!

Paczkator is distributed under the GPL2 license, which means the program is FREE for both private and commercial use. You can also redistribute and modify it. If you do so, I would be grateful if you notified me.

Feel free to contact me if you have questions or suggestions concerning Paczkator.

Version History:

• 0.8 – current release: added localisation, installer and fixed a few bugs
• 0.6 – improved image recognition and scaling procedures, a bug-fix release
• 0.5 – initial release

iKlasa to gadżet, który pokazuje najnowsze fotki twoich znajomych z serwisu Nasza Klasa na twojej stronie domowej Google.

Już niedługo iKlasa będzie dostępna także jako kanał RSS.

Z braku czasu i chęci nie bedę dalej rozwijał gadżetu iKlasa. Dziękuję za komentarze i pozdrawiam wszystkich użytkowników.

English: iKlasa is an iGoogle gadget which displays a feed of latest friends photos from a Polish social-networking website nasza-klasa.pl

I’ve been using Linux for more than 7 years now. The main thing I do on Linux is text editing. Editing configuration files, source files, html files and what not. Initially I used Midnight Commander’s built-in editor (as probably many of you coming from windowed systems). As I became more experienced and geeky I moved to one of the ‘holy editors’: Vim. Vim is an excellent editor with unlimited possibilities but unfortunately mastering it takes unlimited time as well. I used Vim for several years before realising that all this complexity and a user interface from the 70s were not for me anymore. I needed simplicity. I needed something with Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V for clipboard and Ctrl-F for find. I decided to look for another editor.

Here’s what I was looking for:

• as many windows-like (CUA) key bindings as possible. At least Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V.
• syntax coloring
• basic editing functions like search&replace
• needs to work on a VT as well as a console without rebinding keys
• minimum configuration

These features are not particularly demanding, are they? Well, I tried at least a dozen various editors and couldn’t find any that would meet these requirements. Not until I stumbled upon Diakonos.

Diakonos is a simple programmer’s editor for the Linux console that I find almost ideal. It’s open-source, it has all I need and it works out of the box. I’m not going into details (you can read about its features on the homepage), just a screenshot and a list of pros and cons.

Pros:

• very windows-like key bindings (all that I use, I didn’t rebind a single key!)
• no configuration needed (although you can configure it pretty extensively if you want to)
• works on a VT as well as console without reconfiguring putty, .inputrc or anything
• has all the features you would expect in a basic programmers editor (regexps, etc)

Cons:

• It’s slow. It is really slow when compared to any other editor (even Emacs). It’s written in Ruby, which is an interpreted language. I’m not sure if it is for Ruby or the author’s laziness but I don’t really care. It works sufficiently fast on my hardware. It saves a lot of my time which is more valuable to me than cpu cycles.
• Syntax coloring has some problems. I think it has something to do with switching contexts. When editing a PHP file with HTML in it, the coloring sometimes gets funny. Well that’s not a major drawback for me too.

To summarise. If you’re frustrated with complexity of Vim and Emacs, try Diakonos.

This patch I wrote adds a command-line option to hide Sylpheed’s main window at startup and quit when done composing. Useful if you don’t like your inbox popping up when you click on a mailto link in a browser and Sylpheed is your default mail app.

Example setting in Preferred Applications of Gnome:

sylpheed --no-main-window --compose %s

Note that this is just a dirty patch and it works with Sylpheed 2.0.4. I sent a proposal to sylpheed developers some time ago, but I don’t know if/when the feature will be implemented properly.

Download Sylpheed patch (.gz)

This Ubuntu package contains a plugin which lets you play Amiga AHX chiptunes using XMMS.

For those unaware: AHX was a tracker-like music making program for Amiga computers that produced sound similar to Commodore 64. It was developed by the Abyss group and is still popular among oldschool demosceners.

You can get some AHX tunes from Kamson’s lair.

Sources from: https://xmms-ahx.sourceforge.net/ (pretty dated now) … and yes, I’m still using XMMS

Download xmms-ahx_0.6_i386.deb